


i will be the water for your thirst

by That_Ghost_Kristoff



Category: Marco Polo (TV)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Season/Series 02, one author's sad attempt at closure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-21 20:10:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11364744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/That_Ghost_Kristoff/pseuds/That_Ghost_Kristoff
Summary: Even in the aftermath of the Crusaders' arrival, Marco Polo remains idealistic, confused, and forever seeking a guarantee of unconditional trust.He doesn't notice. Everyone else does. That's the problem.





	i will be the water for your thirst

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the poem "In the Desert."
> 
> Write more fics, guys. We were absolutely robbed of this show. 
> 
> I used the Mongol transliteration of Khanbaliq for the spelling because I forgot the spelled it the same way real life Marco Polo did. Whoops.

Marco Polo was Venetian, once.

“Imagine a city without roads,” he tells the tax collector’s daughters and wife, just a month after arriving in the Court of Kublai Khan. They crowd him, demanding stories of the far away West. The plain wooden house stinks of the wet livestock kept in stables outside and fermented milk, but the girls have curious round faces and eyes bright in the soft candlelight. “Instead, there are canals. You use boats instead of horses. In summer,” he adds, “Piazza San Marco is crowded by vendors and patrons of all classes. The air always smells of fresh fruit and blooming flowers. There is no wine in the world sweeter than what flows from the Venetian merchant stalls.”

With a low laugh, Songa says, “You’re describing a dream world, Master Marco. No city can survive without streets.”

His youngest daughter tugs on Marco’s curls, easily accessible from her position in his lap. Two of the girl’s front teeth are missing, forming a gap. “You have funny hair,” she says, lisping her words. “Does everyone have funny hair in the water city?”

“Don’t be rude,” says her mother, though she doesn’t turn from her place by the hearth, where she stirs a pot of stew over an open fire.

Meanwhile, the oldest daughter sketches his foreign face, and he pretends he doesn’t notice. “Yes, everyone has funny hair,” he says instead, so that the younger girls giggle, “but not many as funny as me.” His hair is lighter than most, a gracious gift from his mother. It seems as though it would be no gift now if he resembled his father instead.

“Tell us more,” says the second youngest, or maybe the third, blinking her dark eyes as her resigned mother sighs into the stew.

“If that is what you wish,” he says, and so he spins a tale of lazy gondola rides through moonlit waters, the clear ringing of church bells echoing through cobblestone streets, and the sight of the docks at high tide when the ships were returning with their sails billowing in the wind. He tells these children with their foreign eyes his stories of Venice.

Three years ago, he walked away from this dream world home. He has pale skin, and pale hair, and pale, round eyes the color of the sea, the people here say.

Marco Polo was Venetian once.

He was.

 

 

And now—

It’s late in evening. Marco hasn’t slept in a night and a day, nor eaten in just as long, but he keeps alert beside Empress Chabi as the Khan makes his announcement to his people. “You will be prepared to defend the city without rest,” he says, pacing restlessly himself in his ceremonial robes. “We have had our food and drink. Now it’s time to defend your Khan.”

In the audience, Khutulun keeps her eyes downcast, focused on her horse’s neck. Her grandmother, the cause of all this destruction, is gone.

Kokachin, too, is missing, though her wet-nurses carry her children in soft cloth cradles tied around their necks.

When the Empress touches Marco’s shoulder, he startles away from the cliffside acting his support. “Not you,” she says, almost gently. “You’ve done enough for now. Rest first.”

Exhaustion bruises beneath her eyes and sits heavy on her shoulders, draped there atop her ornate silk robes. He glances at the Khan, who still works to motivate his subjects even as Kaidu’s finger marks grow clearer around his throat. “I,” Marco starts, but stops when she shakes her head. In the low dusk light, her golden hair pins seem dull.

“I will deal with my husband,” she says, “as I promised you I would. You will rest.”

She says it firmly—an order, not a request. Suddenly, he wants desperately just to rest his head on her shoulder. At six, his mother died, and though his distant aunt and the strict convent nuns hidden behind their habits were never cruel, there were never proper replacements. Now, here on the arid steppe with a Christian army advancing at their backs, he struggles to remember what the woman showing him kindness did to her own son’s wife. That she and her husband and all those with them look at his round eyes and see someone ready to betray them for a religion that’s scriptures he’s nearly forgotten.

Too tired himself to protest, he simply nods. “Thank you, Empress,” he says. He wonders where Jingim, Byamba, and Hundred Eyes are, and if they succeeded. If this running Mongol army is about to walk into Khanbaliq to find their Prince hanging from a noose at the gates and a traitor in control.

No. They must have succeeded. With those three, failure is not an option Marco can imagine.

“We will drive the Christians out,” the Khan says, “of every land under the Eternal Blue Sky.” He spares a sideways glance in Marco and the Empress’ direction. Not in blame. Just—something else.

“Now we must ride,” the Empress says, lowering her hand at last, and after a moment, says with as much conviction as her demand that he rest, “We ride home.”

 _Go home_ , she told him just yesterday morning, as though Father hadn’t said two weeks earlier than that Marco was too far changed to ever return to Venice again. Khanbaliq is as close to home as he can manage, with its water lily filled ponds and its paper lanterns that light the streets in a kinder glow than Venice’s open torches. It doesn’t matter what she did, in that moment. Hearing the Empress who owns the East call Khanbaliq _his_ home feels like better absolution than anything the Church can offer.

As the Khan mounts his horse, the Empress mounts hers, and Marco his. The dusk sky shifts rapidly to night, elongating and blending their shadows until they all become one. The Khan’s golden robes glow in the darkness, illuminating him like a piece of leftover daylight. He spares another backward glance at Marco, who lowers his gaze. This is your fault, his Khan’s eyes seem to say. You and the father you saved.

He’s right. Marco should have left his father to the mercy of the archers.

Near morning, they reach Khanbaliq, where Ahmad hangs from his neck above the gates. The Empress flinches at the sight; the Khan rides on, impassive.

The city’s fallen into disarray, recovering from the Vice Regent’s lies. Townsfolk run through the streets spreading rumors and news while soldiers, presumably under Jingim’s orders, fight to keep the peace. In that soft lantern light that Marco’s grown to associate with safety, the chaos feels muted. Ordinary citizens and soldiers alike scurry from rushing horse hooves and fall to their knees when their Khan rides past. He gives orders to the soldiers as they move forward, pausing only long enough for the Empress to ride to his side and whisper in his ear.

When they enter the palace gates, their group thins to the royal family, their personal servants and guards, and Marco. He dismounts, shaking in the cool desert morning. The sun just breaks over the summits of the far mountains, lightening the sky. Soon it will be day. Soon they’ll be back at war.

“Go,” Empress Chabi says, so Marco nods, and walks home.

 

 

Marco wakes to Jingim, who sits in his armor with his feet propped on the corner of the bed, casually thumbing through the notebook half the Court officials have already read. “How?” Marco says, pushing himself up in a scramble to sit. “When?”

Outside is dark, and there’s no noise to indicate a battle. “Byamba and I couldn’t have been more than a day behind you,” he says, laying the book on his lap. There’s blood dried on his armor, and his loose hair is windswept and dusty from a hard ride across the steppe. “We took the high road. That’s how we missed you. The Christian army isn’t far behind.” After a brief pause, he says, “My wife is dead.”

“ _What?_ ”

“You didn’t know?”

Numbly, Marco shakes his head. He noticed Kokachin was missing, but he’d assumed—well, he was anxious, and he was tired, and didn’t assume anything. “How?”

“We found her in the water,” Jingim says, expressionless but glassy eyed. “Byamba and I. One of the wet nurses claims she drowned herself.” Exhaustion sits heavy on his shoulders the way it sat on his mother’s. Well-worn.

Marco runs his fingers through his hair, still damp from the bath he ran to scrub the grime away that stuck to his skin like a stain before collapsing into bed. “I’m sorry, Prince Jingim,” he says, because he knows his own grief isn’t welcome.

For another long moment, neither of them speaks. Then Jingim says, “Father told me. About why _you_ were the one summoned to _my_ wife’s side. Were the two of you—the whole time?”

Again, Marco shakes his head, but he keeps his eyes focused on his lap. He has nowhere to go, and still all he wants is to disappear. “No,” he says. “We hardly spoke after I returned from South China.” They hardly spoke, and now she’s dead with the children she left behind just another lie fabricated through an act of brutality done in an effort to preserve the khanate.

“Did you ever?” Jingim doesn’t complete the question.

“Once,” Marco says honestly. Once, Ahmad told him a truth was a shield and a lie a personal assault. “Before you were wed,” he adds, which is also true, and then lies directly, “Before you were meant to be wed.”

Jingim’s mouth twitches. “Then why?” he says. “Why you?”

 _Because she was just a serving girl terrified and overwhelmed, whom your mother had raped—_ “Because the voices in her head told her she didn’t deserve to birth a prince,” he says, describing what he saw as he saw it, “or to be wed to one, so the only person left to call was the round-eyed foreigner she knew would come.”

Perhaps that’s what the Prince whose wife died wanted to hear, or perhaps the matter is only as settled as it can be with an army at their backs, but he’s again silent. Then he sighs, and says, “Dress. There’s a war council in an hour. My father may be angry with you for letting yours free, but I want you there.”

Regardless of Kokachin’s death, or the Khan’s ill-will, the truth is that while Ahmad manipulated his way through the Court and Byamba lay with the enemy’s daughter, Marco became Jingim’s one ally against a bombardment of bad advice. Marco wonders, distantly, if Jingim only wants a point of view that aligns with his own, or if he hasn’t entirely lost the other man’s trust the same way he lost his father’s.

Jingim stands to exit without waiting for Marco’s answer, and leaves the notebook on the chair. When he reaches the paper screen at the foot of the bed, he pauses, and half turns his body, neither looking at Marco nor away.  “I read it,” he says, “to see if you were duplicitous the way my father made you out to be, but I hadn’t expected to understand it. Not so much of it.”

More than a few times, when they were half drunk on wine or airag, Jingim requested Italian lessons, refusing to allow a Latin foreigner to have a better grasp of languages than he did, which Marco always laughingly gave. “I’ve been away for so long,” he says now, frowning, because he hadn’t consciously noticed that he writes almost exclusively in Chinese, the language spoken as the standard one in the Khan’s kingdom. “I suppose I no longer think in Italian.”

“I see,” Jingim says without offering what he gleaned from his invasion of Marco’s privacy. Then, with that, he leaves, slipping silently away into the night.

 

 

What Marco remembers is this:

Eyes shaped not like his fitted onto faces colored not like his, watching this young boy from a far away kingdom speak his poetry. “No land is dead,” he told the man in gold sitting on his golden throne as all those eyes glittered in the darkened sidelines. “Even at night, the wind grants the sand life in the way it ripples over the dunes.”

Now, the crowd is only eyes, and all the Court officials and royalty nothing but their finery. Now, what he remembers most is a bland judgment. What he remembers now is the Khan of Khans praising his clever mind.

In that moment, the Court faded along with their eyes and their golden ruler, because Father said, “The boy does indeed have a clever mind. Take my son if it pleases you, Great Khan.”

Marco protested, jolting backward so he knocked a faceless guard. There were two of them, their gloved touch burning against his clothed arms. “Papa,” he said. Even then, the Khan and Father made their deal over a human commodity surrendered through deception. “ _Per favore, non, per favore!_ ”

Father reached for his outstretched hand, but the masked guards ripped he and his uncle away before they touched. “ _Coraggioso,_ ” he said as the Khan asked Marco Polo if serving him was not the greatest honor. Just before the doors closed, Father told him he’d return soon, he _promised._  

Then the tall doors slammed, and the hall was silent in the aftermath. Marco stood before the Great Khan of Khans, the Emperor of Mongolia, and choked on air pungent with burning incense and jasmine perfume. The onlookers were faceless. Everyone knew just then that he was worth no more than two bags of silk and trading rights.

But the Khan praised his mind, and the Empress graced him with a smile for his words. Two years later, that’s what he remembers most.

 

 

War comes to Khanbaliq two nights after all soldiers and citizens are locked safely behind its tall walls. In its earliest hours, the Khan calls Marco to his private quarters, where he’s just finishing the tedious task of donning his elaborate armor.

“You’re to accompany my son into the encampment,” the Khan says, to Marco’s surprise, as he fastens his sword to his waist. Only half the candles are lit, casting long shadows across the floor. “Tell the Christians you want to negotiate. Accept nothing. I want an account of their numbers, weaponry, and moral.”

Marco blinks, regains his bearings, and says, “Yes, Sire.” Though the Khan’s order is surprising, Marco’s relief to receive them is not. It floods him with a strength and quickness that leaves him lightheaded, the thought that he might be back in the Court’s good favor.

Wordlessly, the Khan tightens his belt. Marco stands there, awaiting further instructions or dismissal. Then the Khan finishes his task, looks up, and says, “My wife and son both assure me I can trust you. Is this true?”

“Yes, Sire,” Marco says again. “I—yes, Sire.”

The Khan narrows his eyes, and bends to pick up his helmet from the low table beside the lounge. “Why let your father live?” he asks, tucking the helmet beneath his arm as though his choice of words hadn’t answered his own question for him.

Father. The man who bartered him, framed him, brought a Crusade across the desert. Marco’s problem isn’t a division of loyalty. Down at the very foundations of things, the truth is that he doesn’t like death.

“I believed he had nowhere to go, sire,” he says warily. “He was unarmed, branded a thief, and the men with him dead. Even if he did find his way back, what story would he tell? That the Great Khan defeated the Pope’s army with horses? Prester John was only ever meant to be a myth.”

“Your loyalties aren’t divided, Latin?”

“No, Sire.”

Outside the doors to the private chambers comes the rushing sound of soldier’s footsteps, along with shouts too muffled to understand. The Khan looks Marco over, scrutinizing him from his pale hair to his locally made boots. “Are you still Christian, Latin?”

Your mother was Christian, he thinks. “I don’t know,” he says, and finds that this, too, is true. In Venice and on the journey through the Khan’s domain, Christianity was an unstated, well ingrained part of his identity. Now he can explain the chakras, recite Confucian teachings, and tell child emperors stories of wolves and deer before sleep. Now a Christian army is encroaching on his home without cause. Fighting to defending your beliefs, as Kaidu had, is a justifiable motivation; entering another land with the sole purpose to destroy isn’t something Marco can understand.

“The next time someone holds a knife to his throat,” the Khan says, “I expect you won’t interfere.”

When Marco swears he won’t, he means it, because he can’t risk seeing the betrayal in the Khan’s eyes again.

 

 

Prester John greets Marco cordially, and Father greets him warmly, but the sheer disregard they show Jingim leaves him frustrated and anxious. According to some legends, Prester John resides in India, while others claim his kingdom’s capitol is near Casan, in Tartar territory. The latter is true, Marco thinks; the man is too pale and too fair to be from the south, and his army came from the north. As a result, he looks more like his own men than the people he’s fighting against.

After all the guards and soldiers leave, and the four of them are disarmed, Prester John and Father focus entirely on Marco. “ _Come stai, Marco?_ ” Father asks. His face is scarred from blisters—sun poisoning from the desert and damage from the heat the day of the battle. In the light of the torches that blaze around the tent’s periphery, they appear an angry, raised red.

“I’m fine,” he says in Chinese. “Father, Prester John. This is Prince Jingim, future Khan of Mongolia.”

“We are here to discuss peace terms,” Jingim says as Prester John shifts his focus from Marco to him.

Beyond the tent’s canvas walls, commanders and their men walk past, discussing their numbers and weaponry and the last army’s astounding failure without a care about who’s inside. It’s a conglomeration of languages, not all of which he understands, but he understands the different Italian dialects, the Parisian French, the Catalan and Spanish, and even bits and pieces of English. In this tent, up close, Prester John and Father defer to him because he has their round eyes and their European skin, but out in a military encampment’s chaos, even his pale hair paled in comparison to Jingim’s foreign appearance. Blonde, the Southern Chinese call Marco. There are enough Englishmen in this camp to remind him that most of those men have never seen true yellow hair in their lives.

Prester John leans heavy on his staff, as if weary, though he’s younger than Marco expected. “Our peace terms,” he says with a clumsy accent and rumbling voice, “are, and always will be, the conversion of you and your people.”

It’s matter-a-fact, the way he says it. He doesn’t preach. Briefly, Father peels his eyes away from Marco to glance at his leader before his gaze snaps back. Instinctively, he steps closer to Jingim’s side, ready to intercept if they attack.

 “Christianity is welcome in our kingdom,” Jingim says, back as straight as a wind whipped reed, “as are all religions. We won’t ask our people to compromise their beliefs for your god.”

Under his breath, in Italian, Father says that being welcome for a fee is not truly being welcome at all. Flatly, Marco translates, and ignores the look his father sends his way. Jingim angles himself between them, facing Prester John more fully, and says, “What crime is taxation in comparison to this?”

“We’re going God’s work, boy,” the supposedly legendary Christian king says, hand twisting vice-like around his staff.

“Prince,” Marco says before Jingim can answer, chest tight.

Father raises a brow so the scarred blisters wrinkle. Prester John, likely deciding now that Marco’s a heathen worthy only of the burning stake, ignores him.

“No,” the heir to the largest empire in the world says. “This is _your_ work, Prester John. Our gods had no quarrel with yours until your Pope created one.”

That puts an end to their negotiations. After they’ve collected their weapons, Father brings them to their horses and waits while they mount. “ _Torni a casa, figlio_ ,” he says once they’re both situated, gripping Marco’s reins.

“I am home, Father,” he says bluntly. Kokachin is dead because Empress Chabi drove her mad, but the Empress also graced him with a smile and decreed Khanbaliq his home. He won’t surrender that for a suit of chainmail and cross across his chest.

“In the name of Our Lord,” Father says, in Chinese so Jingim understands, as he releases the reins, “what did they _do_ to you?”

“ _Ciao, Papa_ ,” Marco says instead of answering, then clicks his heels against his horse’s side, and follows Jingim back to the city walls. Back to the intrigues of the Court, the cries of Jingim’s children, his rooms on the pond. Back home.

 

 

Mei Lin, down in South China where it was hot and humid and filled with the angry dead, looked at Marco one night when they lay down for sleep with the Emperor between them, and asked, “What did they _do_ to you?”

By then, Marco wasn’t drinking, so she hadn’t meant that. He stopped the moment they found the child. “They aren’t monsters the way you think,” he said. “That’s all.”

Sometimes they do bad things, but they aren’t bad people. Ahmad manipulated the Khan into most of his poor decisions, using familial trust against him. The Empress thought that was the only way to ensure her family’s future. Byamba sided with Kaidu because he loved Khutulun. The worst Jingim’s ever done, to Marco’s knowledge, was temporarily condemn him, which was also Ahmad’s doing, and not unwarranted in the moment. No, they’re not bad people.

Regardless of what the Church or South China propagate about Mongolia’s ruling family, that much is true. No one here tortured him to gain his loyalty, like Mei Lin and his father seem to believe.

Byamba and Jingim, hours after Marco gives the report that the Crusaders match them in numbers but are afraid of the black powder they now lack, join him on the walls. “They’ve surrounded us on all sides,” Byamba says, sitting on an overturned crate. “If they want to starve us, they’re in the position for it. We need to attack directly. They’re setting up their battering rams and siege weapons now.”

“We could send in a small force of our best fighters,” Jingim says, leaning his weight against the wall beside Marco. “Killing the leader will destabilize the army, if not outright stop their attack. Marco,” he adds, “you and I are completing the morning circuit around the walls.”

“I am?” he says. Generals and princes and Khan’s bastard sons patrol, not foreigners with no Court position and the same face as the enemy lying in wait.

“You know more about their weaponry than we do,” Jingim says, then pauses and continues, “Ahmad’s dead. Yusuf’s dead. My father’s running out people to trust.”

Not far away, a scattered group of men laugh. Fire dots the walls with little pinpricks of light, outlining its shape. Below in the city, the streets are deserted except for soldiers anticipating the oncoming attack. Marco nods, and scuffs his foot against the stone floor caked with ash and mud. The Khan is running out of people to trust. What he has left is his sons, and Marco.

“When does Hundred Eyes return?” he asks. Jingim and Byamba swore him to secrecy yesterday morning before admitting Mei Lin killed Ahmad. Good. Even if the others didn’t see it, Marco knows she deserved at least her vengeance.

Shrugging, Byamba says, “He’ll return when he returns. Maybe even soon enough to take care of Prester John for us.”

If anyone can enact Jingim’s preferred plan, it’s Hundred Eyes, or, truthfully, Mei Lin. “We can hope,” Marco says. He wants this to be done with, for the Mongols to win with such finality that the Pope will never risk returning.

An hour or so later, Jingim leaves to see his children, and Byamba shortly after when he catches sight of Khutulun, who’s managed to survive just because the situation demands good fighters. Down the Crusaders’ encampment, Marco sees his father by torchlight, discussing something adamantly with a dark haired soldier dressed in his chainmail and cross. A month ago, Father asked Marco how he was fairing in Court. He can stop archers from loosing their arrows on his word alone, attend war councils and peace negotiations, and calls the Prince by his name. That’s how he’s fairing, and he nearly lost it all for a man who sold him for the price of two bags of silk.

 

 

The Crusade nearly ends before it begins, anti-climactically. Ultimately, even the legendary Prester John can only be what he is, a holy man in his later years fighting for God, and he lacks the requisite skill set necessary to defend against a man like Hundred Eyes.

Within the hour, the encampment below the walls loses any semblance of organization. Hundred Eyes finds Marco on the battlements, where he watches the scene unfold. “The Prince told me I could find you here,” his teacher says, coming to a halt beside Marco with his hands folded behind his back. “I will admit. I’m surprised.”

His patch of hair is longer, and his robes fresh, but there’s blood caught beneath his nails. When he smiles, the expression is thin. Though he’s been back a day, the Khan delivered his orders so quickly they haven’t had a chance to see each other. It’s the second week of the siege, and targeted strikes—that Marco’s been a part of—destroyed three sets of trebuchets. Meanwhile, the Crusaders have weakened their walls and cracked their gates. Marco is as surprised to see his teacher as his teacher is to see him, because he hadn’t known anyone could walk through that encampment and live without waving the white flag of peace.

Below, two brown shrouded monks walk through the fray towards Prester John’s tent, carrying a rolled length of white silk over their shoulders. The fabric’s natural shine reflects the moonlight. Marco, focusing to remember what he sees as he sees it, says, “Jing—the Prince wanted to know how they reacted. I’m sorry that I didn’t come to see you.”

That isn’t what Hundred Eyes meant. Brow raised, he says, “And the Khan?”

Marco doesn’t answer. “You were not gone long,” he says instead.

“My…charge,” his teacher says, “refused to rest. I heard about the siege not long before we reached our destination, and saw no reason to delay.” He smiles another thin smile. “It seems as though I was right to return.”

Steadily, the chaos dwindles back to order, but for the reorganization of prayer and ceremony rather than battle plans. Every so often, a voice rises above the rest so Marco hears individual words or phrases he understands only half the time. Hundred Eyes inclines his head, as though trying to create a picture of the situation.

After a moment, he straightens again, and says, “It’s unlike you to have so little to say.”

Marco taps his fingers across the lowest surface of the wall, and watches. “How was she?” he asks. “Your charge.”

“Sated,” his teacher answers, “for now. That is interesting,” he adds. “She asked after you as well.”

He doesn’t ask for an explanation, and Marco doesn’t offer one. “Good,” he says as a commander shouts a string of curses to a group of soldiers in heavily accented Greek. “They’ve lost their morale. I think you won us the war.”

“It won’t be so easy,” the other man says. Below, the soldiers disband, heads bowed, as their commander kicks a rock. “Even if they lack organization and a rallying point now, there still will be a battle. Or is that what you were hoping to avoid?”

Somehow, during Marco’s many hours at his post tonight, he hasn’t once seen his father. “Doesn’t everyone?” he says, more dryly than he intends. His teacher hasn’t been here for the scathing comments and sidelong glances, nor does he know that all the Khan’s orders are siphoned now through his son, or that Jingim only formally introduced Marco to his children last week. The distrust is misplaced, but well-earned.

“They should,” his teacher says, “but if everyone hoped to avoid war, then you and I wouldn’t be standing here now. Everyone fights for something, Marco.”

The Crusaders fight for God and Jesus, and the Mongols fight to defend their home and faith. Neither Hundred Eyes nor Marco fight for faith, but they’ll fight in defense of their Khan. “Was it hard?” he asks.

Hundred Eyes says, “It was difficult navigating an encampment where I couldn’t understand if the watchman was saying he heard an intruder, or telling his companion he needed to change shifts. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised you’re here after all.”

“What? Why?”

“You are a gateway between our two worlds,” he says, eyes trailing down as though he can see the scene unfolding beneath them. “You understand them. You relay their words to us.”

A yellow-haired commander Marco recognizes from his weeks on the walls stands on a barrel that wobbles beneath his weight, and calls the soldiers to order in Florentine Italian while two men stand on either side, translating into rapid French and Low German. “It’s a useful skill,” he says in agreement, though he understands Hundred Eyes’ implication.

“Useful, and dangerous,” he says. “Acting as a bridge is never a stable position.”

“Nothing will happen,” Marco says, frustrated, because what those scathing words and sidelong glances manifested into is a series of brief sleeping shifts disrupted by nightmares of his father condemning him in the name of God, or the Khan throwing him uncovered to the mercy of the horse’s hooves. Kokachin is always there in the end, a phantom on his back whispering that they’re right. He knows what he’s done. He knows what he should’ve done.

Sighing, long and exaggerated, Hundred Eyes says, “I hadn’t meant to judge you.”

Maybe he wasn’t judging Marco, but Marco was doing a remarkable job judging himself. “Of course,” he says, and turns his attention back to the enemy camp, where the monks stand in huddle with their eyes to their Bible and their tonsures turned to the night sky in an effort to absorb God’s good grace.

 

 

At daybreak, Marco delivers his report to Jingim and the Khan, who directs the two of them to return to the camp to accept the Crusaders’ surrender. Marco’s lightheaded from a sleepless night of observation, worsened by the scent of jasmine and incense that always pervades the throne room.

They ride out just before noon under a white banner, with Byamba acting as their only armed guard, though every archer on the wall has his bow drawn taunt. “ _Necesito hablar con su commandante,_ ” Marco says once they encounter a face he recognizes, an older man with silver threaded through his dark hair and scruffy beard from somewhere in central Spain, or so he assumes.

“ _Son un hereje_ , Marco Polo,” the man says, exhausted, ignoring the Prince of Mongolia entirely, and spits at Marco’s feet. When Byamba’s hand goes to his sword hilt, Marco shakes his head, too tired himself to begin a conflict they can’t win.

Despite the soldier’s disdain, he leads them to a tent not far from Prester John’s. It’s a plain brown, with a pattern threaded around the flap in white string, which is just unique enough to stand out against the backdrop of identical tents erected around the city’s perimeter. He enters first, leaving them with a larger guard than their last leader’s, for so long that Marco has trouble keeping still. The soldiers that walk by mutter as they pass. Unlike last time, the objects of their scorn aren’t the foreigners. Even Jingim, whose first half-drunk Italian lessons consisted of a repertoire of colorful insults, grits his teeth when a soldier with a Milanese accent calls Marco the son of a whore.

Eventually, the Spaniard steps out, and beckons Jingim and Marco to enter. When Marco finds his father inside, seated on an unpadded wooden chair with his scarred face thrown in sharp relief by the firelight, he isn’t surprised. “ _Non parliamo cinese_ ,” Father says before anyone else speaks. “ _Non questa volta. Père Jacques_ ,” he adds in French, “ _est Parisien._ ”

 “ _Allora parliamo italiano_.” Jingim’s understanding of the language is limited, but his understanding of French is non-existent. Glancing at him, Marco adds in Chinese, “If all parties agree.”

Jingim agrees. Father Jacques does not. His eyes are small and dark, and his hair a shock of red. Apparently his Italian is also imperfect. That seems fair enough to Marco; it’s better to have two middle men translating than three members of the negotiation insist on speaking a foreign language.

“Tell him,” Marco tells his father, so that he doesn’t need to translate for Jingim, “that this isn’t his land. He doesn’t get a choice. If he doesn’t like that, then he shouldn’t have come.”

Though his father translates, his changes the words so Marco sounds politer than he is. Father Jacques, however reluctantly, concedes, but only to Italian. This complicates things more than necessary—Father’s presence is pointless when Marco could easily conduct the discussion himself, but he knows the only people in this camp who trust his words are Jingim and Byamba.

“ _Prester John è morto_ ,” he says, uncomfortable as speaks over Jingim, though he doesn’t edit his translation. “ _La sua guerra es finita._ ” He tells his father and his leader that they if they admit defeat now, the Great Khan will allow them to leave without giving pursuit.

When Father translates, he only paraphrases. Then he pauses, listens to Father Jacques, and Marco tells Jingim, “He said they have no intention to leave until Prester John’s dishonorable death is avenged.”

His father presses his lips into a line. “Marco,” he says, in the same tone he might use to scold a child. Behave, he’s saying. Know your place.

“ _Désolé, Père_ ,” Marco says to Father Jacques directly, and then reverts to Italian, again speaking over Jingim to explain that there’s always honor in defending your home, and that the Crusaders will lose any battle they begin.

Father Jacques blinks his small, dark eyes and states, like his predecessor, that they’re doing God’s work. Faster than his father, Marco translates, and then speaks over Jingim to his father rather than the military commander, telling them to take their army and their god, and leave.

Clearly, Father Jacques’ limited Italian is expansive enough to understand that, because he raises one thin, pale brow, and says, “ _Notre?_ ”

“‘ _Loro?’_ ” Father repeats, and snaps that Marco was only meant to gain the Court’s trust, not become one of them.

“How was I _meant_ to do anything?” Marco says, slipping in his aggravation back into the language of his day to day life. “As I remember it, you sold me for trading rights.”

“I did what I had to,” his father says in a more stilted Chinese than Marco’s spoken in years. His cheeks flush, reddening the pockmarked scars. “You’re of our culture, our faith. How long did it take you to forget—”

Marco exhales sharply. “Aren’t you,” he says, “the one who said Venice would never have me again?”

Beside him, Jingim tenses, and Father Jacques watches silently, blinking infrequently. Father, who stands beside his chainmail clad priest, dressed in his own funeral garb, says, “Not as you are, but there’s still time. Your choices can still—”

“I’ve accepted my choices,” Marco says, folding his arms. The focus is now entirely on him. Suddenly, the air is congested, and his conviction wavers. Steeling himself, he says, “Any fault you find in me because of them is as much your responsibility as mine.”

“And yet you saved me once—”

“Twice, Master Polo,” Jingim says, overlapping Marco’s protest. “Your son spared your life twice. A mistake he won’t make again, should you attack. Master Marco,” he adds as he turns his attention to Father Jacques, “tell the priest he and his men have until morning to vacate the city perimeter. It’s time they return West.”

He repeats the message as his father stares blankly past him. This time, he doesn’t show them to their horses, and they walk out alone, escorted by a guard who never takes his hand away from his hilt. By the time they escape the encampment and enter the city gates, Marco’s twitching at commonplace sounds. Was Jingim defending him, or making a promise? Will he leave the throne room alive, or will the Khan kill him to avoid the risk of mercy? Will the Empress send him away once the Crusaders are gone and his linguistic skills no longer necessary?

When Byamba says his name, Marco jumps, jogged away from his thoughts. They’re in the stables, alone with the servant boy replacing Kokachin’s rapist. Frowning, Byamba says, “Are you feeling all right, Marco?”

“Yes,” Marco answers, locking his horse in for the night, and adds, “Thank you,” reflexively.

Byamba doesn’t hide his skepticism, but also doesn’t press. Jingim orders them out, and doesn’t look at Marco again.

 

 

In the hours before the battle, Marco attempts to sleep, and only does so in fitful bursts. He dreams of her mother, of her favorite dress’ silk green skirts, speaking her muddled Italian as she scolded him for avoiding his Latin lessons. He dreams of Nergui begging for a merchant son’s poor offer of love. He dreams of the Khan’s thick hands around his throat.

Despite the dreams’ subject matters, he finds that when he wakes, he wishes he weren’t. It begins with the Empress summoning him for tea, to her untouched Garden of Fragrance, where she dismisses all her ladies and guards. “Not all discussions,” she says, “are meant for servants’ ears,” as though Marco is somehow different from that categorization. “Sit, Marco.”

Restless sleep leaves his mind foggy, a state worsened by the heady aroma of summertime flowers and the daytime heat, but he follows orders and sits. “What can I help you with, Empress?” he asks, attempting to blink away the exhaustion.

She smiles in that way of hers, that smile that might be genuine, but always barbed with a threat. “I only require that you protect my son during battle,” she answers, and sips her tea, “as you have done before. But not all matters involve demands. No, I have a question. Are you loyal to the khanate?”

“Yes, Empress,” he says, hardly shocked. Asking directly is new, but their trust in him is fragile, which everyone has made abundantly clear.

“And would you do anything to protect it?”

“Yes, Empress.”

For a moment, she’s says nothing, looking at him evenly. Then she says, “You know a terrible secret, Marco. If you’re truly loyal, you will forget that secret exists. Regardless of who it involves.”

Before Kokachin died, she told Marco she wished her children had eyes the color of the sea, but it’s for her widower and his family now that he swallows his morality, and says, “I swear on—whatever you think is best, Empress.”

“Swear on her.”

“I swear on her.”

The Empress sets down her tea, and dismisses him with her own promise to never send him again.

After, his day only worsens on the wall where he struggles not to nod to sleep, until Khutulun joins him on the row of crates and says, “There’s going to be chaos the moment the battle ends, one way or another. I’m leaving. You should come with me.”

She looks straight ahead towards the far wall rather than to him, so the low dusk light shadows her profile. He straightens, glancing left and right to be certain no one’s listening. “Why me?” he asks, thinking she must not know he’s the one who shoved the blade through her father’s back to make an offer like this. “Why not Byamba?”

“Byamba made his choice the moment Jingim killed my brother,” she says, fingers twisting her leather skirt. “No one here gives a damn about a round eye, but you aren’t like the rest of them.” She laughs, the sound bitter. “Either side.”

I ruined you, he thinks, but selfishly keeps that information to himself, because he’s unused to the feeling of someone believing he doesn’t have an agenda. “I can’t leave,” he tells her, so that she finally looks at him in full. She appears as exhausted as he is. “Not when my father helped cause this.”

“Didn’t mine?” she says, body tensing. “Does that mean I should too?”

Shaking his head, he says, “Not like this. Defense and deception are just that. The Christian Crusades are a violation.”

“They’ll kill you,” she says, jerking her head towards the city so her braids slide over her shoulder. “You have to know that. Pale flowers don’t survive in the Great Khan’s kingdom.”

“This is what I have,” he says bluntly. Even without the Khan’s gold tablet of protection, her face and her blood will always protect her. His eyes—the sea colored eyes Nergui desired for her children—are permission for any highwayman or loyal subject to run a sword through his heart.

Slowly, her shoulders fingers release her skirts, and her back rounds into a slouch. “You’re still their prisoner,” she says. “It doesn’t matter how they treat you. In the Court of Kublai Khan, the only commodities they value above silk are conquest and beauty. That’s why my father knew he needed to reform it.”

“People with power always want more power,” he says, because even if her father only wanted reform, her grandmother was a glutton for the power Ahmad dangled before her. This is Khutulun’s family’s fault, but she’s still innocent. “That’s why the West has a Pope.”

Again, she shakes her head. “I can’t accept that,” she says. “I’m still leaving. With or without you.”

“Run,” he tells her. “I’ll say nothing.”

She stands. “Survive if you can, Pale Flower,” she says, giving her goodbyes now before the bloodshed begins. “There aren’t a lot of decent men left in this world.”

When he helped Mei Lin escape, she said the same. It ironic. His blatant disregard for ecclesiastical studies only ever gained him threats of predestined Hell long before his father’s Crusade condemned him. “Safe travels, Khutulun,” he says, and hopes she ignores the desire to seek revenge, because he never wants to see her die the way so many of her family already have.

 

 

The battle comes that night, hours before the given deadline, because both sides know that no number of threats can convince the Crusaders to leave.

It starts with fire—a line of black power exploding in a series of destructive sparks and bursts that burn the trebuchets to the ground. During the resulting chaos, Khanbaliq opens its gates to let its infantry and cavalry spill from the streets. Archers stand ready at the walls. The Khan leads the assault. Marco stays by Jingim’s side, both on horseback, at the Empress’ request and out of an irrational fear to let him out of his sight after the last near disaster.

Though the soldiers were clearly expecting something, it must not have been a full force attack, because too few are appropriately dressed and armed. Without the sun to guide him, Marco quickly loses track of time, but he knows it hasn’t been long before a dying man with a gutted stomach looses an arrow from his bow in desperation, and strikes his horse in the throat. Marco avoids Ahmad’s fate narrowly, but slams his head against the hard packed ground so his ears ring and his vision blurs. He gasps, mud catching his mouth. Someone shouts his name.

A moment later, he’s standing. Khutulun nods once, releases his sleeve, and runs.

The battle is larger than the last, and more disorienting. More than once, Marco parries a strike from a Mongolian soldier before the man realizes who he is and scrambles away.

Eventually, he finds Jingim again, stumbling across him as he ducks behind a tent in an effort to escape an archer. There’s a cut down Marco’s leg he doesn’t remember getting, and another in his side from an arrow that barely missed its mark. The Prince of Mongolia fights alone, defending a fallen soldier with an arm severed at the elbow. Marco, forcing down the nausea, focuses on the soldier approaching from Jingim’s blind spot. He picks up a heavy rock, the nearest projectile, and throws it hard at the soldier’s head. It meets its mark, clattering against the man’s metal helmet and dragging his attention away.

The ensuing fight is short lived. Though the man is larger, and less injured, Jingim finishes his own battle soon enough to notice his surroundings, and stabs him with a dagger in the gap between chainmail and helmet.

“Take him back to the gates,” he says, raising his voice over the noise, but those orders fail because the man with the amputated arm is already dead. “Go back, Marco,” he says instead.

“It’s not so bad.” The injured are meant to retreat, but Marco has all his limbs. He can still fight.

Though Jingim’s expression sours, they aren’t in the position to argue. Blood mats his hair to his face. As they go to rejoin the battle, a gloved hand wraps around Marco’s upper arm and rips him away.

In a flash, he’s back on the ground, and Jingim’s sword clashes with another so metal rebounds against metal with a loud clash. Marco regains his bearings and looks up, all in the matter of seconds. In a matter of seconds, Jingim disarms his opponent, and runs him through.

Father collapses heavily to the earth, weighted by lifelessness.

Marco doesn’t realize he’s stopped breathing until Jingim calls his name. Father’s unblinking eyes stare at him, accusatory in the firelight, as Marco gets back to his feet and follows his friend to battle.

 

 

During Marco’s first year in the East, when the animosity between he and his family cooled, his father handed him a bible he transcribed himself after a year long visit to the Vatican when he was Marco’s age. “It gave me comfort when I first left home,” he said. Father did that often, talked about the comforts he needed when he left for his first journey away from Venice.

“Thank you, Father,” Marco said, but only politely, and admitted eventually, once his uncle asked why he never opened it, that he didn’t know Latin.

“You’re already learning the Uyghur language,” Father said, aghast, the stick he used to stoke the fire hanging forgotten in his hand. They were in the desert, where the sunlit days scorched Marco’s skin red but nights remained dangerously cold. “Chinese. Mongolian. And yet you don’t know Latin? Did the Sisters teach you nothing?”

Embarrassed, Marco said, “It never stuck, I suppose.”

In Venice, he learned Italian as his native tongue, Greek and French and Arabic because they were essential for trade, and English and Spanish from the docks. His mother told him stories of his father, the great adventurer who walked the Mongolian steppe and Taklimakan Desert. He listened to each street performer’s and weary traveler’s stories of the creatures, people, and terrain found past the Byzantine Empire. As a child, his head was too full of the future and the living world to bother much about Heaven and the language of the Church.

He doesn’t miss the West as a society or a culture, but he misses this: navigating the Venetian waterways, waking to the call of gulls, painting masks in preparation for Lent. Maybe he misses his aunt and uncle, just a little. He doesn’t remember enough of his mother to miss her.

When he thinks of his father, he doesn’t miss him, but he feels something.

That’s the problem.

 

 

Inevitably, now that the siege is done, Marco and Jingim talk.

“I need the truth, Marco,” Jingim says. They’re in the same positions, with Marco in the bed and he in the chair, though now sunlight streams through his window, casting long lines of white across the floor. “How did you meet my wife?”

Marco walked away from battle with a gash down his leg, his side lacerated, and an arrow in his shoulder. In the three days since, the only person he’s seen outside of the palace healers was Byamba, who told him the Khan implicitly placed Marco back under his protection by singing his praises, but hadn’t mentioned Khutulun. He was too trapped by the fever then to participate in a conversation, but he doesn’t have the excuse of one to avoid this conversation now. His head is clearer than it has been in weeks.

“I went riding in the grasslands often when I first came here,” he says, selecting what he can reveal. For the respect of Kokachin’s memory, for what Jingim needs to hear, for Marco’s own safety. “So did she. There was nothing inappropriate. She scolded me once for offering to help onto her horse, which is considered courteous in Europe.”

“You were friends?” Jingim says, drawing his brow close in careful doubt.

Shrugging his good shoulder, Marco answers, “Friends were in short supply. For both of us. Loneliness can be stronger than propriety.”

Let Jingim glean from that what he will, Marco thinks, but his friend, with unfamiliar hesitation, asks, “Did you love her?”

“Jingim,” Marco says, “don’t—”

“Did you?”

The silence hangs over them, oppressive with suspicions and implications. “I don’t know,” he says eventually. “I have nothing to compare it to.”

Thankfully, Jingim doesn’t ask if Kokachin loved him. Marco doesn’t think he can lie about that. Not yet. Instead, Jingim runs his fingers through his hair and curses. “Why aren’t I angry with you?” he says, frustrated. “My father told me—if it was only friendship, why keep it from me?”

Again, Marco shrugs. “We saw each other in the hall that day,” he says, “and she said it was good to meet me. That was all. I never wished to hurt you.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” his friend says, and doesn’t seem any happier for it. Marco fidgets, or tries, before his injuries force him to keep still. “Of course you wouldn’t. I was so suspicious of you at first, the wide-eyed foreigner soaking up my father’s attention. You were so earnest that I assumed you had to be plotting against us, but I think I understand now.”

“Understand what?” he says, wary at Jingim’s sudden shift in tone.

“Kokachin was kind to you,” he says. “My mother’s kind to you. Byamba calls you friend, I call you brother, and my father—well, yours sold you for silk, but we all bought your loyalty the moment mine validated your worth.”

That isn’t a question. Marco’s gaze flits away from his friend, searching for a new focus. “I’d like to think I’m not so cheap as that,” he says, but it sounds weak even to him.

Jingim shakes his head. “You fought with your father in Chinese,” he says, “four days ago, in front of me. The familial arguments I have experience with involve the fate of dynasties. I never thought I’d hear a merchant dictate on the whim of convenience whether or not his own son can return to an entire _city._ ”

Though Marco isn’t the first to have this fate, he doesn’t expect a prince with little interaction with the common people to understand its frequency. “He wasn’t wrong,” he says dully, running his hand across his thin sheets. “Venice won’t have me as I am now. My appearance will always be Latin, but I’m heretical in the eyes of the Church. As you’ve gathered. I’m not Venetian now. Not in the way Venice requires.”

“Then it’s good my father saw the worth in your clever words,” Jingim says. “A world that creates men like your own would have killed you.” When Marco looks up again, over, Jingim meets his eye. “Swear that you’ll have no more secrets, even those as serious as your past with my wife. I need to know I can trust you. Unconditionally.”

Marco says, “I swear,” even as he thinks of the secret he’s meant to forget. The words turn ashen in his mouth, but ultimately Jingim is right, and the lie is worth any trust he earns in return.

 

 

The victory festival lasts a week, celebrating the defeat of the Crusaders, of Kaidu. On the final day, the palace healers release Marco from his bed with a warning to mind his injuries.

“Marco,” the Khan says once Marco follows the summons to the dais holding the imperial family and Court nobility. Not Latin. Not Polo. Just Marco. “You’re looking well.”

With that, the Khan’s implicit message that the round eyed foreigner is a protected friend is solidified. In the last week, the Khanbaliq swapped its white light lanterns for colored ones, so the Khan’s golden robes glow a sunset red.

“Thank you, Great Khan,” Marco says. It feels as though his fever returned, burning through him black powder hot as the Khan calls for a goblet of airag and Empress Chabi smiles, beckoning him to her side.

Later, when his head is fuzzy from drink, and his body uncooperative from barely healed cuts and bruises, he escapes the energy and the bustle by instinctively retreating to the training hall. It’s dark, but he navigates it through muscle memory and habit. The carved wooden column’s hard against his back, and the padded floor soft beneath him. He rests his head against the column’s edge, breathing in the incense burned to cut through the sweat and blood.

In here, the cacophonous roar of outside celebration doesn’t exist. He sits, swallowed by silence, until Hundred Eyes says, “They will notice your absence eventually.”

Let them. Marco can hardly breathe, which seems excuse enough for anyone to disappear. “I will beg forgiveness in the morning,” he says as his instructor draws nearer, stopping beside him at the raised platform’s edge, “once I regain feeling in my arm.”

“Yes,” Hundred Eyes says, lowering himself to sit cross-legged, though he and Marco are rarely on the same level. “The Prince did mention an arrow.”

For Marco, the end of the battle is a blur, but he knows the bowman who struck his shoulder was the same Milanese man who called him the son of the whore. “It was my fault,” he says. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“From what I hear,” the other man says, “you had just seen your father die. Even the best of us become unbalanced after a sight like that.”

Marco fiddles with a loose thread in his hem. “It was no less than he deserved.”

“No,” Hundred Eyes says bluntly, “it was not. He brought an army into our land. But a terrible father is still a father when he’s your tether to home.”

“Venice is not my home. He made that clear.”

With a sigh, he says, “You once said that about Khanbaliq.”

“Things are different.”

“Are they?”

When Marco claimed Khanbaliq wasn’t home, his bed was a cell bench and he woke every day angry and confused with his father for deciding his fate. Now Kokachin’s spirit carves her secret into his dreams each night, but the Prince of Mongolia wants him here.

Hundred Eyes shifts, so his shadow moves across the darkened wall. “Regardless,” he continues when Marco says nothing, “acknowledge what you feel, and let it go.”

Laughing, the sound just a short, half-delirious burst, he says, “I don’t mourn him, if that’s want you imagine. You can’t mourn a man you don’t know. I just—I’m just—”

“Confused?” Again, Marco doesn’t answer, so his teacher says, “I never said you had to mourn him.”

“He grabbed me,” Marco says, the story bubbling up all at once. “I don’t—he may have tried to kill me, or capture me, or—It doesn’t matter. Jingim stopped him, whatever his purpose. That’s why my father died in battle rather than be taken as prisoner. Prince Jingim killed him so he wouldn’t get me.”

Abruptly, he wonders what would have happened if he had died in battle. Jingim would never have gotten his answers, but Marco only told half-truths anyway. Byamba has many friends, and Hundred Eyes has many pupils. The Khan and the Empress would never worry about the foreigner spilling their secrets. Khutulun left midway through the battle, and would have regardless.

There’s no one else to consider. If Marco died today, burned out in fever or slipped away in the water like Kokachin, nothing in Khanbaliq would change.

As if predicting his thoughts, Hundred Eyes says, “The Prince made the right choice. Your life is of more value to the Khan than the opportunity to see your father executed.”

“Prince Jingim believes the Court bought my loyalty through validation,” Marco says.

“I don’t disagree with that either.”

Marco shuts his eyes briefly and when he opens them again says, “One of the nuns found me a position delivering market goods from the docks to teach me the value of hard work. They said I daydreamed too often to live up to the Polo name. My aunt claimed that was ridiculous—and her husband had a partner who worked as an educator for noble families. I was allowed to meet with him after I finished my deliveries each day. And so I received an education.”

“Do you wonder what they would think of you?” Hundred Eyes asks, not in judgment or accusation, as though Marco can tell him he does and there would be nothing wrong in it.

“Don Paolo died the year my father returned,” he says, adjusting himself to sit straighter. The darkness is clearer now, the shapes around the room more distinct. “There was a storm. He was on the water. I know what the Sisters would say, and I only ended up there because my aunt and uncle rarely knew what to do with me.”

Hundred Eyes makes a noise like a hum low in his throat. “So you don’t mourn your father,” he says. “There’s no one in the West you miss. You just declared this is your home. I think I fail to see the root of your confusion after all.”

That’s not what Marco wanted to hear. There are times when Hundred Eyes seems to have all the answers. That’s what he wants now. Someone to say what’s wrong with him and explain how to fix the fault. “It’s nothing,” he says. “I’m ill, and I’ve had too much to drink. I should return before they notice I’m gone.”

He stands, cringing when he puts too much weight down on his bad leg. Before he can step forward, Hundred Eyes catches the back of his shirt. “You’re ill,” he says, “and you’ve had too much to drink. Even the Khan will concede you risk infection if you stay. Go home. Rest. When you wake, the world will be clearer.”

Home. _Home._ Marco stumbles home, waving away Byamba’s concern when he encounters him in an alley, and collapses on his bed. He dreams of Nergui in her blue riding cloak with moonlight in her hair standing at the edge of Piazza San Marco, smiling in that sad way of hers as she pushes him down into the Adriatic Sea.


End file.
